books!

[wolffyluna]

ain't I a woman? by bell hooks

"Wolffy, did you intentionally read this in February?" No, I tried to read it in January and failed. It's an interesting and also deeply depressing history of the affects of racism and sexism on Black women in the US.

Some observations, not the most important, but interesting: - wow, you can really tell this was written in the early 80s. Both things like "I have no clue what media she is referencing" and also things like "what do you mean the women's liberation movement didn't have a transformative affect on US culture?" There was one part where she was talking about the relative prominence of different civil rights activists and how the men were more famous, and she talked about how [paraphrased] "people know about (man I do not remember the name of because I have literally never heard of him*) but they don't know about Rosa Parks." Man, the past was a different country. - this book is weirdly like Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Hear me out: on of the things that's really noticeable is that he is having to argue his point with one hand behind his back, because evolution through natural selection only works if there is some source of heritable variance, and he knew of neither DNA nor the fact it can mutate. ain't I a woman? has a similar thing going on with the idea of intersectionality. Which makes sense, this was written 8 years before Crenshaw's paper, but you can feel hooks having to make her arguments much more [wiggle hands] deliberately and carefully than she would if that idea was already in the academic water. - so, bell hooks is one of those relatively famous authors who people don't... read that often. And certain ideas of hers get quoted more often. So, I knew going in that she was Very Pro Friendship, but not that she didn't like birth control and was anticapitalist. Though she comes by her anticapitalism honestly: she does not want us to become hunter-gatherers, but she does deeply dislike a system where people throw their time/energy/dignity into something that makes more money for other people.

*I feel bad that I cannot check his name, but alas, audiobooks.

Dungeon Meshi by Ryoko Kui

I recently finished the anime, which adapts the manga up to the halfway point, and then kind of. inhaled the manga. It's really really good. The art, the characters, the worldbuilding, it's all phenomenal.

It's about a party of adventurers whose healer got eaten by a dragon as she teleported them back to the surface. They're going to go down there to rescue and resurrect her before she gets fully digested-- but they are short on money and time, and so to survive the dungeon, they must eat the monsters in the dungeon.

Now, I originally passed on this anime/manga because it sounded like a particularly fantastical entry in that Japanese genre of Episodic Food Stories. And the food is important, but the story is much more concerned about systems. Ecosystems, economic systems, all slathered with the sauce of What Food Means. It is actually "deeper than it sounds.*

It's good!

Just as a content warning: there is a whole lot of cannibalism, and later in the story there's a lot of sexual assault as visual metaphor. (Which I am not warning for because it's in poor taste, the metaphor is part of what Kui is trying to say, but it is Pretty Graphic at points.)

Links - text: [how only fans took over the world]( https://aella.substack.com/p/how-onlyfans-took-over-the-world) (nsfw, natch) - text: [how to deal with stress when you can't really affect the situation] (https://bsky.app/profile/questauthority.bsky.social/post/3lgrwi3jiwc24) - video: ToddInTheShadows' top 10 pop songs of 2024 - video: why Russian history makes War Thunder players leak classified documents - video: what do Swedish and Norwegian speakers thing of each other's languages?